Again, Gaines is shrewd enough not to let James end his ordeal at this point but forces him to confront the obstacles of bitter cold and hunger in order to accomplish his sensory rite de passage. Ivan Turgenevs The District Doctor. Gaines himself cites Ivan Turgenev as one of his more important literary sources, saying that he learned form from Turgenev. Currently you are able to watch "The Sky Is Gray" streaming on Hoopla, Fandor Amazon Channel or for free with ads on Tubi TV, Crackle. One means nothing more than the other. Such readings all share a serious, albeit unintentional, flaw; they suggest that one must understand all actions and most events as direct or indirect consequences of race, rather than individual choice. Why does he later say that grass is black? In Los Angeles, race riots in Watts resulted in 35 deaths, the arrest of 4,000, and $40 million in property damage. It made me tear up mutiple times and shook me out of the comfort of privileges. Also in 1964, a white minority in Southern Rhodesia elected as Premiere, Ian Smith, under whose leadership Rhodesia managed to postpone representative government for another two decades. Rather than reading a good book with a cup of coffee in the afternoon, instead they cope with some harmful bugs inside their computer. The Sky Is Gray. He is a sincerely religious faith healer/musician, but his religion is heavily tinged. . Though her family is clearly poor, it is evident that they have learned to function within the constraints of their poverty. Understanding The Sky is Gray requires that one not only understand something about the Louisiana of the 1930s and 1940s but also understand what was happening with regard to race in the United States during the 1960s, because the events of what later came to be called the Civil Rights era made a substantial and lasting impression on Gaines, one that can be seen not too far beneath the surface of The Sky is Gray in the person of the student and in the storys preoccupation with racial inequality. Summary. Gaines, Ernest. While many argue that the difference between races is less substantive than the difference between the classes, class inequality clearly takes a back seat to racial inequality in Gainess fiction. Me, I dont listen to my heart. The drawback to what Ill call, for lack of a better term, race-based readings may not be immediately obvious, but isnt terribly complicated. The storys protagonist, or main character, James is a young boy of about eight who lives with his mother, aunt, and their immediate family in the outskirts of Bayonne, Louisiana. Get help and learn more about the design. Source: David Y. Kippen, An Overview of The Sky is Gray, in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 1999. Jamess mother Octavia is a strong, proud, uncompromising woman largely based on Gainess own mother. Monsieur Bayonne at the storys beginning is the superstitious complement to the preacher in the middle section. The title of the story "The Sky is Gray" by Ernest Gaines is ironic. The purpose of the heart is to pump blood throughout the body, and nothing else.. In 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated in New York and outbreaks of anti-black violence occurred in Selma, Alabama, including Ku Klux Klan shootings and Martin Luther King leading a procession of 4,000 in a protest march from Selma to Montgomery. BIBLIOGRAPHY Style Just as the clouds clear after a storm, James finds out on his trip to Bayonne that the stormy clouds that are his life are parting to let some sunshine through. Consequently, his feelings of isolation cause him to alienate himself from the emotional support and comfort of the members of his community, whom he, in turn, deprives of the benefits of his education. Based on Gaines own experience, the character of Monsieur Bayonne is a mildly unsympathetic but still dangerous figurethough he acts without malice, his actions keep James from a dentist for several days. The Sky is Gray. She has cut herself completely off from the community which conceivably could have provided her with support while her husband does his tour of duty in the army. Yeah, the sky . 2324- 2333. New & Pre-owned (11) from $4.90 + $3.99 shipping. The action in "The Sky is Gray" is broken up into thirteen short sections which describe a half day or so in the life of James, an eight-year-old black boy in the rural South of the late 1930s. Publisher Chicago : Perspective Films Language English. . But it was "The Sky Is Gray" that first drew me in and that still evokes a certain atmosphere in my mind. From Ernest J. Gaines, author of "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman," comes a deceptively simple, yet emotionally complex tale of a young boy's discovery of what it's like to be black in Louisiana during the 1940's. The Sky is Gray. What might be complex, three-dimensional people with equally complex motivations threaten to become two-dimensional caricatures with obscure, even uninteresting motivations when seen through the eyes of a child. Plot Summary Two of the stories in Bloodline, A Long Day in November and The Sky Is Gray, are particularly illustrative of the conflict between community perspective and individual needs. It is a testimony to Gaines's skill as a writer and storyteller that many people believe Jane Pittman was a real person. From a larger, more global viewpoint, these motions support and underscore Jamess own transformation. Critics have been kind to Gaines, but his reputation has not risen with such meteoric speed as have the reputations of some of the other contemporary black writers of his generation. Twenty-five for me to come back, twenty-five for him. Not added . With his degree in hand, Gaines won the Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship for Graduate Work which allowed him to begin work in Stanfords Creative Writing program, the first of many fellowships he has received. artistfacts. Added . The advantages of episodic form, when relating the experiences of a young boy, are obvious, and have been used with great success in works as different as Mark Twains Huckleberry Finn and Rudyard Kiplings Kim. After graduating from high school, Gaines attended Vallejo Junior College, did a stint in the Army, and then returned to the Bay Area to take a degree from San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University). It is both more reasonable and more in keeping with Gainess own views on the importance of dignity to read Octavia as intentionally withholding warmth from James to teach him that the value of their personal dignity is greater than the value of the most basic comfortsbeing warm and well-fed. Furthermore, the story implies that the community can continue to provide the individual with emotional support in his efforts to fulfill his individual needs. Bloodline: A Black Mans South, in CLA Journal, Vol. He could have told it through the eyes of Jamess mother Octavia, or Val; he could have told it in epistolary form (as a letter) from Jamess mother to his father; or from an omniscient perspective, one that allowed him to describe the sensory and sentient world from all of these vantage points in turn. Style In Gainess words, describing the type of person he depicts in the student to Carl Wooton in an interview reprinted in Porch Talk: you will have this rebellion against authority. In the following essay, Meyer describes how The Sky is Gray is a coming of age story not just about coming to terms with growing up, but also dealing with the sensual orientation of ones body. Washington Irving, The Sky is Gray by Ernest J. Gaines, 1968, The Slavery Issue: Western Politics and the Compromise of 1850, https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/sky-gray. However, because she never explains her motives to him, she presents James with a world filled with extremes which endangers his realization of the manhood she attempts to force prematurely on him. ." The blacks then leave the store under the kindly but acute genius in America, with tyrannous eye: James recounts how shes still there watching us (italics mine). . . Ernest Gaines, Boston: Twayne, 1991. While they wait for the dentist to reopen his office, Octavia must devise ways in which she can keep James from the cold and at the same time carefully adhere to strict rules of racial separation. She was preparing him to take care of himself in case she had to go away like his father did. Two years later, in 1963, the conflicts began in earnest, with riots and acts of racial brutality against demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, culminating with Martin Luther Kings being jailed in Birmingham. The fact that his father is gone to war, his mother is a very. His feelings of isolation are clearly illustrated in his conversation with a woman who attempts to take his side in the disagreement. The dangers that her approach poses to James are dramatically illustrated in the argument between a minister and a student in the dentists office, the scene of much of the action. Sold by: Tidal Wave Group . The narrator, James, has developed a toothache resulting in him needing to go to the dentist. Though he can accurately recall the words of the student in the dentists office that lead up to the student being hit by the preacher, he cannot understand the argument in which they are engaged (She just looks at him like she dont know what hes talking bout. https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/sky-gray, "The Sky is Gray In 19, Writer, educator But assume for a moment that Octavias world is not so simple. ''The Sky is Gray'' is fundamentally a story about the process of coming of age, of going from one state to another. How? But the question remains whether or not in this blending of black and white into The Sky Is Gray there still may be too great a personal pain and sense of loss or self-betrayal for black youth or artist ever to transcend Gunnar Myrdals penetrating observation: The colored peoples are excluded from assimilation.. You have remained in right site to start getting this info. But this much is clear. Ernest J. Gaines was thirty in 1963, the year in which "The Sky is Gray" was first published, but it was not until five years later, in 1968, that the story was published as the second story in Bloodline, the thematically interwoven collection with which readers associate it today. Her alternative, however, creates an atmosphere which, for James, is potentially equal in the dangers it poses. Because James is suffering a toothache, symbolic of the festering wounds of racism, he and his mother take the bus into Bayonne to see a dentist. Young James (8 years old) mind is weighted down with guilt knowing his tooth has a big effect on the familythey might not be able to feed the family because of his tooth. Taking what she hasher pride and her povertyshe moves toward her goal of inculcating in James a sense of independence and dignity in self undeterred by offers of kindness and generosity. Ernest J. Gaines is best known for his third novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), which recounts her latter-day observations of living in a racially torn Louisiana through the century between the War between the States and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. He was the first of twelve siblings, seven by his father Manuel, five by his mother Adriannes second husband, Ralph. My heart tells me, the boy says. That work, like the five stories constituting Bloodline (1968) before it . The Sky Is Gray: Directed by Stan Lathan. But this cure fails, too. The sky is gray., The interaction between the community and the individual, along with its role in the shaping of human personality, is a primary concern of Ernest J. Gaines in much of his fiction. Ralph was strict about the kinds of children he would allow Gaines to befriend; because of his stepfathers insistence that most of the local children were trouble, Gaines turned to the local public library for entertainment and solacean institution that had been closed to him in Louisiana because he was black. Pressure continues to mount on the government over a number of events that allegedly took place in Whitehall and Downing Street while COVID-19 restrictions were in force. They are struggling for survival after James' father is taken in the army. whatever their motivation may be, their small generosity will only be accepted as kindness, not as charity. Bloodline, his collection of short stories published in 1968, is a work that includes some of his best known short fiction, "The Sky Is Gray," "Just Like a Tree," and "A Long Day in November" (also published as a children's book in 1971). Sora Ga Haiiro Dakara summary: A collection of short stories. In Ernest Gaines's "The Sky is Gray", James is the protagonist and main character. The limitations imposed on the narrative by an eight-year-old narrator are more obvious when he tries, unsuccessfully, to understand his mothers frequent mood changes or her mysterious decisions to fight or flee at each of the stations of mood the narrative visits. Less clear, because less attention has been paid to this question, is how much is left when race is left out or made irrelevant to the readers. In 1948, at the age of fifteen, Gaines moved to Vallejo, California, to join his mother and stepfather, because there were no high schools for blacks near his home. In the gloomiest days, when the calendar suggests that winter is over, but the St. Petersburg weather is still unrelenting, the sky is gray, snow and wind are underfoot all over the world . Babb, Valerie Melissa. In the following essay, Roberts looks at the communal bonds found in Southern black communites, especially those as described by Gaines in The Sky is Gray. Along with this, he describes the dangers inherent in a community where tradition and change interact. The conflict in these two stories further illustrates the importance of the changes taking place within Southern black culture to the development of the social consciousness of children. It is not possible, within the scope of this essay, to survey all of Gainess works, or to make more than a cursory pass through The Sky is Gray. It is also not possible, in a discussion of what Im calling moral readings, to avoid some necessary oversimplifications of the complex issues surrounding and clouding the idea of race. Gaines is best-known for his novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, published in 1971 and adapted into a television movie starring Cicely Tyson in 1974. A poor African American boy and his mother experience both discrimination and kindness during a trip to town to see the dentist. She uses her new awareness to structure her world into clear-cut oppositional units. Futhermore, he is forced to wash dishes at night to finance his education. As Gaudet and Wooton point out, Gaines has come to the fore in many critical studies lately because of his searching appraisal of the masculine search for identity, particularly that of African-American men., David Kippen is a doctoral candidate in world literature with an emphasis on the literature of southern Africa. [Chorus 1: Barry McQuire, The Mamas & The Papas] All the leaves are brown (All the leaves are brown) And the sky is gray (And the sky is gray) I've been for a walk (I've been for a walk) On a winter's day (On a winter's day) I'd be safe and warm (I'd be safe and warm) If I was in L.A (If I was in L.A.) California dreamin' (California dreamin') On such a winter's day [Verse: Barry McQuire, The . After a long walk, they finally arrive at the dentists office, which is already full of people waiting to be treated. However, for the moment, James is literally and figuratively caught in the middle of a storm in which both social and personal forces threaten his well-being. For example, the road in this story is very gray: "It's a long old road, and far's you can see you don't see nothing but gravel," as James put it. The trip to town on the bus marked White and Colored represents the real rite de passage for the black youth in white Americathe blurring of his sensibilities into gray: The river is gray. During the exchange between the men, the minister exposes the weakness of his position when he becomes frustrated and strikes the student. I was very much impressed, not only with form, but with how [the Russians] used their peasantry, how they used their serfs.. On the street again, James turns his collar up to keep his neck warm; his mother tells him not to, because only bums turn their collars up, and he is not a bum, he is a man. - "The Sky is Gray" 9 terms. The minister accepts God unquestioningly, while the student rejects God because belief in Him alleviates the need to question: Show me one reason to believe in the existence of a God, the boy says. 2019Encyclopedia.com | All rights reserved. 18, No. Faced with the necessity to act and finding traditional solutions no longer viable, the characters in Gainess stories struggle desperately to restore some semblance of normalcy to their worlds. Observing his mother manipulate their environment moves James closer to what will be his particular entry into manhood, the psychic freedom that comes from emotional self-mastery. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia.com cannot guarantee each citation it generates. Introduction Edited by Eugene Current-Garca and Bert Hitchcock. 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